Concerti and Coffee Cups

Over here, they're one of the symbols of America, on par with the Statue of Liberty, the flag, the Eagle, and well ahead of any chain restaurant you can name. People won't know any US states, but they will know these vehicles.

The thing is, here in Germany, we don't have dedicated school buses. The general idea is that kids go to school on their own. When that's not practical, they're expected to use (and given free tickets for) public transit. Public transit is designed around this requirement; there are many places where there is a bus, and anyone can get on it, but the route and timetable really only makes sense for school children. In case a dedicated school bus is really needed, that's generally subcontracted out, and the lines either use something like a Sprinter Van for smaller routes, or a normal city or interurban bus (often a used one that's a bit older). School trips are normal public transit, or a rented bus, typically a coach or regional bus.

It's not a perfect system, in the past couple of years there's been an epidemic of people bringing their kids to school in their cars instead of letting them walk, which is less than ideal. It is what it is. But building a dedicated network of public transit lines only for students, and building dedicated vehicles only for that, has never occurred to anyone here.

Of course we know about these buses, from movies and such, but they're as foreign here as cacti or pick-up trucks (actually we're seeing more and more of these here) or yellow cabs (all europeans will assume all cabs in the US are yellow until they actually visit).

You do see these buses here at times, because people still generally like the idea of the US, even if they have a lot of issues with a lot of details, and so folks bring them over, along with stretch limos and stuff (also not really a thing here). And of course, if someone goes to all that trouble, they don't do it to haul school kids, they rent it out for city tours or as a party bus or whatever.

So you see these yellow things as a symbol of faraway places, scenic vistas, some vague undefined idea of freedom that doesn't necessarily hold up to any contact with reality, and it's just a huge part of the whole US aesthetic.

And then you go to a student exchange with the US, and you finally get the chance: You yourself get to ride in one of these iconic chrome yellow buses! It looks just like in the movies! You get in, you drive in them a little…

…and you realise they're shit. Just the worst buses in the western world. Terrible suspension. Uncomfortable seats with weirdly high backs (so they don't have to put seatbelts in, they just restrict how far kids can fly in an accident). Everything made out of the cheapest materials. Turns out the reason why the US uses school buses like that instead of normal modern city buses, which the US has, is to save money and because they just hate kids.

And then it hits you why US Americans say "as American as apple pie", a dish that is made and enjoyed literally anywhere in the world, instead of "as American as yellow school buses". Of course the Americans already knew all this. They got tortured by these things forever. It would never occur to them to see this as a symbol of America, it's just a normal part of life for them. It's a symbol of school and school life and sometimes normalcy, and tells us that these actors getting out of it are supposed to be teenagers, nothing more.

Europe was actively trying (for better or for worse) to move away from the medieval model, but it was baked into the existing shape of things; America very much took advantage of not having existing settlement and land ownership arrangements to respect to arrange things according to the zeitgeist.

Which means that American communities, especially west of Ohio, tended to be laid out on a pattern wherein 'going into town' was an operation in its own right. Not necessarily a highly arduous one, but even your nearest neighbors were frequently out of sight.

Then, we got serious about universal literacy, and universal general education beyond literacy, and started mandating kids going to school for increasingly long stretches. And it's simply not practical, with that layout, to have a school in walking distance of even a majority of rural homes, especially if you want distinct curricula for different ages and all of that; you could never train and pay that many teachers.

So school districts are drawn up much larger than it would make any sense to have a kid walk across. Oh yeah, ten miles uphill to school in the snow. That won't impede attendance.

My mother grew up in New York City and most certainly never took a school bus, but because of the settlement patterns that the 18th and 19th century lawmakers thought were up-to-date and efficient for land use, a majority of rural communities were in a position where there wasn't enough demand for establishing public transit to make any goddamn sense, because a majority of adults worked where they lived and tended to need cargo capacity when they did leave home. (Hence the ubiquity of the pickup truck.)

But hundreds of children needed to be rounded up and then dispersed again, every single day. Thus, the school bus. Objectively ridiculous, but in context it's a rational solution to a situation created a few generations previous. One idea of modernity interfering with the next.

Knowing all this has always made this bit of Beren’s song instantly reduce me to tears:

Though all to ruin fell the world

and were dissolved and backward hurled

unmade into the old abyss,

yet were its making good, for this—

the dawn, the dusk, the earth, the sea—

that Lúthien on a time should be!

Tolkien straight up wrote a poem that said “the world could end, but it wouldn’t have all been pointless, because she was in this world, however briefly, and that justified all the rest.” Kills me.

so i immediately inquired

and now you may ask. what the fuck did my roommate think that sign meant? well

Apparently his mom didn’t like his wife. So she set their house on fire. The house i was living in.

He assured me that everything was fine now and that this was years ago, just kinda laughed, smiled, and said ‘You know how moms are’

Yes. I know how moms are. I know how fucked up moms are as well. I have known many fucked up moms and fellow children of fucked up moms.

Attempted murder through arson is not typical mom behavior, even for a fucked up abusive mom

This is the family dynamic i was tossed into

HOUSE ONE

1st floor— landlord and his wife

2nd floor— identical twin sister of landlord’s wife, occasionally children (not clear whose)

3rd floor— me ☺️

HOUSE TWO

1st floor— landlord’s mother, who previously set house 1 on fire

2nd floor— adult daughter of twin sister, her young kids, and current man (changes of man signified by throwing clothes out of window)

3rd floor— creepy brother of the twin sisters who is always outside working on his van

Then one day my landlord is in his truck, pulling out the driveway when he stops and asks

‘Hey— you haven’t been short on rent these last few months, have you?’

No… I had been paying in full, on time

To his wife. In cash

He wasn’t normally home when i would go to pay rent, so i would give it to her. Figured it was the same as giving it to him.

Turns out instead she was pocketing $100 off the top and telling him i was short each month.

And he knew it was happening. He just wanted to confirm.

‘Each month she makes it her little pay day! Well you know how wives are’

He was a hospital chef. Oh. And a wedding dj. He tried many, many times to hire me to help work dj events for him.

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